Large companies should reveal how much of their profits they pay in tax to developing nations to show they comply with local corporation tax regimes, Stephen Timms, the Treasury minister, will say tomorrow as part of a three-pronged effort to boost tax revenues in poor countries.

Developing nations must also be given access to secret tax agreements between western governments and other poor nations together with expensive technical support to help them rein in tax-dodging companies, he will tell the first meeting of a high-level tax committee at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the Paris-based club for the world's 16 richest nations.

Timms wants the OECD to adopt the measures as part of a wider crackdown on tax avoidance by corporations. "The agenda reflects the concern that developing countries also need to benefit from the new co-operative tax environment the OECD is working towards," he said.

The government estimates that developing nations miss out on £30bn to £180bn in lost tax each year from thousands of western companies that operate across Africa, Asia and South America. The amount of lost tax dwarfs Britain's current aid budget which was £6.3bn last year.

Officials on the International Accounting Standards Board have faced calls to include country-by-country reporting in annual company reports and accounts.

Christian Aid lobbied the IASB in an effort to show how much tax was lost to the exchequers of developing nations when major corporations generated billions of pounds of profits from local manufacturing and mining.

Last year, the IASB agreed to investigate the impact of local tax disclosures on mining and oil companies. But politicians are known to have grown weary of the wrangling on the IASB, which is dominated by investors more concerned with disclosures that demonstrate the effective deployment of shareholder capital. Critics of the IASB also point out that the organisation, which is attempting to draft a set of reporting standards for all listed companies, is funded by banks, investor bodies and accounting firms that want to protect companies from further regulation.

A report by the Task Force on Financial Integrity & Economic Development, a Washington-based thinktank, argued that country-by-country reporting was needed to support developing world nations. "Country-by-country reporting would be of considerable benefit to developing countries by letting tax authorities and other regulatory agencies see just what multi- national corporations located there actually do, how their trade is undertaken and what profits and taxes they declare," it said. It is understood the report proved influential on Treasury thinking before the OECD meeting in Paris.

Last year Gordon Brown, the prime minister, and France's president Nicolas Sarkozy called for wider co-operation among OECD countries on tax-gathering to protect expensive welfare programmes that are funded through tax receipts. British corporation tax receipts were down by a third in 2008/09 on the previous year and are expected to remain low this year.

OECD guidelines are not binding, though the agreement of the 16 nations is seen as giving a strong message to companies. Timms said the efforts of western nations to prevent tax leakage to offshore havens should also benefit poorer nations.

However, one senior accountant, who asked to remain anonymous, said the government was taking potshots at the wrong target. He said most multinationals were keen to avoid double taxation from operating in more than one country and had little to gain from attempting to avoid tax altogether. "Big listed companies are well-known to tax collectors and, by and large, pay the tax due. Obviously there are exceptions. Businesses that avoid most or all of the tax they might otherwise pay are not listed; they are private equity firms, hedge funds and rich individuals based in offshore havens," he said.